“I didn’t bring anything to cook,” said Tess.
“We could just make one to keep warm,” he suggested.
“Well, maybe a little one,” said Tess, wondering if there was some park regulation against fires on this beach. “Maybe after we eat.”
“Oh cool,” Erny cried and he spun in a circle, his arms outstretched.
Tess, who had been feeling vaguely guilty about the missed fishing opportunity, brightened. Erny liked it here. It had not been a mistake to come. On the contrary, she felt as if she were releasing her anxieties into the pure air like so many balloons. The time had come, she thought, to seize this beautiful place and own it, for her son’s sake. Time to leave behind the terrible memories.
“Maybe we’ll bring your pole next time we come,” she said. “Or we could come swimming here in the summer.”
He had seated himself on the bench across the table from her and was already chewing on his sandwich.
“Have a drink,” she said, tossing him a juice box across the table.
Erny ate and drank in silence for a few minutes, contentedly surveying his surroundings. “I like it here,” he said. “It’s like a secret hiding place.”
Tess nodded and looked around as she ate her sandwich. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Wait,” said Erny dramatically, holding up a finger.
“What?” she said.
“I hear something. Listen…” he whispered.
Tess listened. She could hear the sound of a car’s engine in the woods. “Someone else is here,” she said.
“Aliens,” Erny whispered, wide-eyed.
Tess smiled at his imagination. “Campers, more likely. There are campsites back there. Or maybe fishermen. It’s a national park, honey. We aren’t the only people who can come here.”
Erny shook his head. “Aliens,” he said gravely.
Tess shrugged. “You never know. Want an orange?”
Erny shook his head. “Cookies.”
Tess rummaged in the bag. “You’re in luck.” She pulled out a plastic bag of thumbprint cookies and fished a few out for Erny. Erny ate them in a flash.
“Can I go exploring?’ he said, looking curiously at the forest that edged the hill and the narrow beach.
“I guess we could take a little walk. We need to collect some twigs and branches for our fire.”
“That’s right,” he said. “What can we put them in?” He looked around, frowning. Then his face lit up. “I know.” He unzipped his sweatshirt and pulled it off. Underneath he was wearing a T-shirt. “We can put them in this.”
“Honey, you’ll be cold,” said Tess.
“It feels better without it on,” he insisted.
Tess shook her head. Erny, like all of his schoolmates, went off to school each day, even in the winter, with only a sweatshirt for warmth. Erny always insisted he was warm enough and, she had to admit, he didn’t seem to suffer from poor health as a result. She always reminded herself of how her own grandmother, Dawn’s mother, used to say that it did a child good to be out in the cold air. Maybe it was true.
“If you’re already hot, why do we need a fire?” Tess teased him.
“Ma…” Erny wailed at her lack of imagination.
“Okay, okay. That’s a good idea you had. We’ll put them in the sweatshirt. Turn it inside out so you won’t be full of splinters when you put it back on.”
As Erny was obediently reversing the sweatshirt, inverting the sleeves, Tess’s cell phone began to ring. She pulled it from her jacket pocket and looked at the ID. The Stone Hill Inn. She felt a little anxious throb in her throat. Her mother wasn’t one to call without a good reason.
Tess frowned. “I’d better take this.” She pushed the button and held it to her ear. “Mom?” she said. “What’s up?”
“Tess, you won’t believe it,” said Dawn.
Erny had gotten up from the table and started filling his hoodie, now a wood carrier, with twigs he was scavenging among the leaves. “Stay where I can see you,” said Tess.
Erny nodded and continued his search. Tess watched him for a minute and then returned to her call. “Won’t believe what?” she asked.
“Nelson Abbott,” Dawn said.
Tess frowned. “What about him?”
Dawn hesitated. “They let him go.”
Tess went rigid. “Let him go? When?”
“Last night, apparently. I just heard it from a reporter who called here. The lawyer, that Ramsey fellow whom Edith hired, said there was something wrong with the evidence and he got the judge to go along with it. The judge said Nelson was free to go. They’re not going to arrest him.”
“I don’t understand. They have the DNA,” she protested. “What more do they need?”
“That’s all I know, honey. Nelson’s attorney convinced them.”
Goddamn him, Tess thought, picturing Ben Ramsey’s ice blue eyes. He had found his loophole. “I guess I must have violated Nelson’s civil rights somehow. I mean, what’s more important? The way the DNA was obtained or the fact that he killed my sister?”
“I don’t know, Tess,” Dawn said wearily. “I’m not a lawyer.”
Tess’s mind was roiling. She understood that there were legal procedures that had to be respected, but now that they knew he was guilty, couldn’t the police have held Nelson Abbott until they obtained evidence through other, more…traditional means? Besides, Tess was pretty sure that private citizens were allowed to do things that the police couldn’t do. Private citizens could tape phone calls and it wasn’t called wiretapping or entrapment. Surely this was the same kind of thing?
“Tess?” Dawn asked.
“I’m here,” said Tess. “Yes. All right, look. We’re coming back. Erny’s not going to like it, but…”
Her gaze swept the beach but he was not there. Not enough twigs, she told herself. Not enough twigs on the beach. He must have gone up to the edge of the woods. All of a sudden, from the direction of the woods, she heard an inchoate shout. To her ears, in her gut, it sounded like Erny calling for her. Tess glanced around, telling herself it was her imagination. Then, clearly, she heard a wailing sound and the thud of a car door or a trunk slamming.
“Erny?” she cried.
“What is it?” Dawn was asking on the phone, hearing the panic in her daughter’s voice.
“I’ll call you back,” said Tess. She snapped the phone shut and began to run. “Erny,” she screamed. “Erny, where are you? Answer me this minute!”
There was a sound of an engine revving and tires screeching.
“Erny?”
No, she thought. No. Be here. Call out to me. Jump out from behind a tree. Scare me. “Erny!” she screamed. She ran up the hill, stumbling, crying out for him, looking around. She plunged into the woods and toward the trail that led to the campsites. There was no sign of a car, but there was dust in the air and pines and bits of leaves drifting back to earth where a car had pulled away.
“Erny, where are you?” she screamed. But he did not answer. She looked all around her, but it all looked the same. Pine needles and dead leaves among certain bushes and trees still strangely green though winter was nearly here.
“Erny.” She kicked through the leaves, rushing first one way and then another, looking up the trail helplessly for some sign of him.
“Oh my God,” Tess wailed, but it came out as a squeak. No, no. It can’t be. He’s hiding. He’s here. She started back toward the beach, trying another path. Her heart was pounding hard and she stumbled, landing against a boulder as the toe of her boot kicked into something soft and heavy. Something that gave way, moved.
She looked down and saw what she had kicked. A hand lay open, fingers curled. Tess clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream and steadied herself against the boulder. She jumped back from the boulder and then forced herself to go around it to look. It was a man, lying on the ground among the dead leaves. His eyes were open, but he was not alive. She could see that instantly. Under his head was
blood, sticking to the leaves, running down into his neck matting his short, graying haircut. Nelson Abbott, his mouth hanging open, as if in surprise at the suddenness of his own death.
Beside him was the beginning of a hole. A trough someone had started to dig. A grave, left half-finished, as if the digger had been interrupted in midtask.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh my God.” She looked up from the murdered man’s face, looked around at the trees that rustled in the gentle breeze. “Erny?”
And then, before she could even formulate the next question in her mind, her gaze landed on a hapless bundle just beyond the boulder. And the sight of it was more horrible to her than the sight of any bloody dead man. Of any ten men with their heads smashed in. For there, tossed aside on the ground by someone who didn’t know or care what they were discarding, lay a hooded sweatshirt, tied in a bundle, half-filled with twigs.
CHAPTER 22
The uniformed officer held a wadded sweatshirt in his gloved hands and pressed it to the nose of the leashed hound. The black dog jerked his head back and then forward again into the cloth, then nervously stepped away from the proffered sweatshirt, straining at his lead. “Okay, Diablo,” said the handler. “Find it.” The dog took off, sniffing the ground and the tree trunks, pulling his handler toward the deep woods.
Tess shook her head. “We’re wasting time,” she insisted. “He’s not in the woods. He would hear me calling for him. He’d come back. Don’t you see that?”
Rusty Bosworth crossed his arms over his broad chest and squinted into the trees. “Boys get lost in these woods all the time. If he’s out there, we’ll find him.” The dirt roads that ran through the campground were clogged with police vehicles and the ATVs of volunteers who had fanned out to search for Erny. Members of the press were being kept back behind a police line, but there was a constant hum of chatter from their direction.
“I told you what happened. Erny must have witnessed…something,” Tess cried, unable to keep her tone rational. “Whoever killed Nelson Abbott took Erny. My son’s life is in danger.”
Chief Bosworth assessed Tess coolly. “Well, now, that’s your idea of what happened, but it could be completely wrong. I mean, you know from past experience that your version of events can be…inaccurate.”
“How dare you?” Tess exploded. “My son is missing and you—”
Rusty raised a hand. “Calm down. I’m agreeing with you. To a point. Your boy may have seen something, panicked, and took off running into these woods. Dropped his sweatshirt as he ran.”
“I heard him scream,” Tess cried. She was almost screaming herself and her face was white with the strain. “I heard the car tearing away. The tires screeching.”
“Well, we only have your word for that, Miss DeGraff. You claim that when you found Nelson Abbott, he was already dead. But I have to consider all the possibilities. Now, you say there was a car, but what if there wasn’t? What if you asked Nelson Abbott to meet you here and things got ugly. After all, you were so sure he was involved in the death of your sister.”
My sister, Tess thought, looking helplessly around the woods, the campsite, the path to the beach. The same nightmare, in the same place. But this time it was her son who was taken. This time it was Erny.
“Excuse me, Chief, can I have a word?” asked a gray-haired man with glasses dressed in coveralls.
Rusty turned away to speak to the crime scene expert. Just as he did so, his phone rang and, after looking at the caller ID, Rusty took the call, turning his back on Tess. When he finished his call, he spoke again to the gray-haired man in coveralls. The expression on Bosworth’s face darkened with every word he heard. Finally, clearing his throat, Rusty nodded and turned back to Tess. “All right. I’m gonna be upfront with you. The head of my forensic team here tells me that Nelson Abbott did not die on this spot. He was already dead when he was placed here.”
“Of course, he was already dead,” Tess cried. “Someone was trying to dig him a grave. Can’t you see that?”
Rusty ignored her angry tone. “That would tend to corroborate your story about the car. The fact that he was brought here and dumped. Also we’ve determined that the estimated time of death seems to coincide with the time when you were renting the canoe over on the other side of the lake. I had a man check out your version of events. That was him on the phone. Apparently the old man with the canoes said your story was true. So this pretty much lets you off as a suspect.”
“A suspect?” Tess cried in disbelief.
“Don’t act so surprised, Miss DeGraff. You were very angry at Nelson Abbott…”
Tess stared at him, but did not respond.
“But you were not the only one. Your brother, Jake, also publicly accused the deceased of being your sister’s killer. He had to be dragged away from the press conference, he was making such a fuss.”
“Jake was upset,” Tess insisted.
“He was more than upset. He looked mad enough to kill,” said Rusty. “Now, I’ve sent a couple of officers to pick up Jake for questioning. Once we catch up with him, we’ll know more.”
“You’re accusing Jake of snatching his own nephew? That’s absurd,” Tess cried.
“Is it really?” said the chief, his eyes flashing angrily.
A squad car roared into the clearing and stopped. The driver got out and came around to the passenger side. He opened the door and Edith Abbott struggled to climb out. The young officer took Edith’s arm and helped her over to where the body of Nelson Abbott lay under a gray tarp. Rusty walked over to her.
“Aunt Edith,” he said. “You might want to wait to see him until they’ve cleaned him up a little bit. Uncle Nelson doesn’t look too good right now.”
“I want to see him,” said Edith stubbornly.
Rusty nodded to the bespectacled man in the coveralls, who crouched down and pulled back a corner of the tarp. Edith Abbott stared down impassively at her husband’s battered head. Then she looked up at Rusty, blinking behind her glasses. “Who killed him?” she said.
Rusty shook his head. “I don’t know yet, Aunt Edith. We’ll find out.”
Edith looked over at Tess. “Her?” she asked.
Rusty frowned. “Like I said, we don’t know yet. After his lawyer got him out, what did he say to you? Did he say anything to you today about where he was going?”
Edith stared down at the covered body, appearing slightly dazed. She shook her head for a moment. Then she looked around the clearing, now filled with police vehicles and the cluster of reporters gathered in the area, which the police had roped off for the press. “He was going to the newspaper,” she said, her voice trembling. “To talk to him,” she said, looking directly at Chan Morris, who, thanks to his local connections, was standing in the front row of the crowd of journalists.
Rusty Bosworth collared one of his officers. “Get Channing Morris,” he said. “Bring him over here.”
The officer went over and indicated to Chan Morris that he should climb under the rope. Chan pointed to himself, puzzled, and the officer nodded. Chan bent down and ducked under the rope. Then he walked over to where the chief was standing with Edith Abbott.
“Chief,” said Chan.
Rusty Bosworth did not acknowledge the greeting. “Mrs. Abbott here tells us that Nelson Abbott was on his way to the paper to see you when she saw him last.”
Chan’s gray eyes looked pained. “Well, yes, he did come to see me.”
“What about?” Rusty asked.
Chan grimaced. “He wanted me to know that he was cleared of all charges. He threatened to sue me for the article in the morning paper. The article that said that Miss DeGraff implicated him in the murder of her sister.”
Edith Abbott let out a low moan. “How could you? How could you, Channing Morris, after all those years Nelson worked for your family? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Abbott. It was a big story. I had to do my job,” said Chan. “Obviously, I made a mistake.”
Rusty glanced at Tess, who looked back at him defiantly.
“Anyway, he wanted me to print him an apology,” said Chan. “Especially since the lawyer had proved it wasn’t him who did it.”
“He proved no such thing,” Tess cried. “Nelson was freed on some kind of technicality.”
Rusty turned on her. “You’re talking about something you don’t know anything about.” He turned back to Chan. “What did you say?” Rusty asked.
Chan shrugged. “I said I would do it. Print an apology.”
“And that was it?” Rusty said.
Chan shook his head. “He implied that he knew who really killed Phoebe DeGraff.”
The muscles in Rusty’s jaw twitched. “Who?”
Chan shook his head. “He didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“I asked him,” said Chan.
“Did he tell you?” Rusty asked. And then he shook his head, answering his own question. “He wouldn’t tell you,” said Rusty in steely disbelief.
Chan stuck out his chin defiantly.
“Don’t play games with me, Morris. If you know who did this,” said Rusty, glowering, “you’d better speak up. And don’t give me any of that journalistic integrity bullshit or I’ll throw your ass in jail.”
“Do you know who has my son?” Tess screamed, lunging at Chan. “Do you? If you do…”
Rusty and another officer reached out and held her back.
Chan looked from the chief to Tess gravely. Then he shook his head. “Believe me, if I could help you, Tess, I would.”
Rusty looked at Chan in disgust. “He doesn’t know anything. He wants to look important.” He poked a finger in Chan’s chest. “Get back behind that rope,” he said. “Stop pretending you’re a journalist.”
As Chan was unceremoniously escorted back behind the police line, Rusty turned to his aunt, who was sneaking furtive glances at the body of her husband, as if she felt as if it were wrong to look at him.
“Aunt Edith, do you know anything about this?” he asked. “Did Uncle Nelson tell you who he believed was the guilty party?”
Edith Abbott’s shoulders slumped and she shook her head. “He always believed that Lazarus was guilty. Now I hear that he had another idea. I don’t know. He didn’t say so to me. But then again, he never did tell me much,” she explained. “He had a secretive nature.”
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